| > 1. Delivery - For our flat, their network either fails to deliver, mis-delivers or screws up in some other way far more than they succeed. There is no option to choose the one postal service that shines for my property: Royal Mail. Anything I order from Amazon may turn up eventually, but certainly isn't going to arrive whenever they claim. This is my #1 reason for abandoning Amazon. Very few online stores give you a choice of delivery service. For me Royal Mail are the absolute worst (DPD are ideal, others are close), but it seems to vary by area. I find Amazon gives you a lot more choice than any of their competitors (they integrate with four or more different "collect a parcel from here" services, in London you can almost always find a pickup location very close to wherever you are). I mean if you live somewhere where Royal Mail are better than XYZ then a Royal Mail-only store is better for you than Amazon, but I don't think anyone's better in general. (Also in London you have Prime Now as an option). > Either you can't find what you want (the range within cycling for example is extremely limited) and have to look elsewhere Oh? A week ago I was looking for some specific bike accessories (to go with a specialized bike that I'd bought from the one shop in London (perhaps even in Britain), but even they didn't have the accessories for it); on ebay they were badly described and the range wasn't good. Amazon had what I needed. Maybe a specialized online bike store would have an even better range, but I don't want to have to figure out and trust a new store for every product category I might want to buy; I want a generalist, and Amazon is good at that. > 4. Bundling - Amazon Prime Video really isn't as good as Netflix, Amazon Prime Now isn't beating Shutl for me in London https://shutl.com/uk/, free postage hasn't been compelling (point #3)... but somehow bundling all of these things together into an ~£80 per year subscription is supposed to make a range of sub-par offerings value for money? Doesn't it? Their video isn't as good as Netflix, their music isn't as good as Spotify, I'll take your word for it that Shutl is better - but a year's subscription to Netflix and Spotify and Shutl and ... would cost a fair bit more than GPB80, the Amazon options are good enough a lot of the time, and having it all integrated in one place is valuable. > I've purchased things on Amazon Prime, thinking they were covered by Amazon's customer service, only to discover that the obscure market place seller is really the seller and so my warranty complaints go back to them. I would agree that the UI isn't as obvious as it might be, but it's still pretty easy to see who the seller is > They've been overseas and uninterested, and I've had to simply write-off the value of those items. What? No. If they're not honouring their warranty, do a credit card chargeback. |
The ones I'm now using all do.
The different options of exigency are usually different providers, which is very convenient.
> Oh?
As a quick experiment I built a bike from components and accessories last year and couldn't find any of the items I wanted on Amazon, but have just tried again.
No Rohloff hub, Enve rims, Gilles Berthoud mudguards, Schmidt dynamo hub, etc.
Only the brake pads for Hope brakes, not the brakes themselves.
The only bits of an entire bike that I managed to find was the Carradice bag and the Fizik saffle. No other part was on Amazon.
> Amazon options are good enough a lot of the time
They're only "good enough" if having them means that you do not have the Netflix, Spotify and other things in place. A quick survey of the people sat around me with Prime is that every one still has those subscriptions elsewhere.
It's not a saving if it's in addition to other costs.
> If they're not honouring their warranty, do a credit card chargeback.
A warranty period is measured in years, a chargeback period is measured in days... 60 days is usually the upper limit.